Rot is fecund. Fruiting bodies sprout and spore on the body politic: gamergate; the ‘beta uprising’. The clamour of such trolling shows how very unquiet sadism is, how not nearly repressed enough. It seems poised to become less so.

It would be absurd technological determinism to blame social media for this, just as it would to praise it for creating any of the collaborative collective action it has, without question, aided. Conversely, it would be naïve to deny that forms impact norms. With social media and online culture the barrier to entry to performative psychological sadism is lowered. The conjunction of the addictive narcissistic economy of social media with neoliberal subjectivity feeds, feeds off and encourages such obsessive and toxic behaviours, and the performativity of the panopticon.

The release of coagulated clots of such matter as online ‘manifestos’ and statements by racist and misogynist mass- murderers such as Anders Breivik, Elliot Rodgers and Christopher Harper-Mercer is commonplace. Their actual acts, too, feel inspired by below-the-line sadism, in spectacle and vindictiveness, in the pettiness-as-terror. This is real-life and -death trolling, the literalising of the flame-war injunctions to hate-objects, targets of spite and sadism, to die.